Ildur

You need to stablish yourself on familiar grounds before building a ship and setting sail to the horizon, hoping to discover a brand new continent or a new route to the Indias.

The answer from the elezen wasn't short: "Excellent. I'm sure you can start without me. I'll be back in a few moments, though only the gods know how long it will take for the guards to allow me entrance again."

Oh, right. That forgetteable event! I...forgot about it. So I guess it's possible. Though there are no katanas that I can think of, and I'm not sure if the background offered by the event was enough to come up with something usable that is not "fantasy Japan". Or maybe that's exactly what it is. I forgot, as I said!

That reminds me of Smaugh's (Smough?) armor. That one's hilarious. But I have to agree that Dark Souls armor design is pretty awesome.

Wildstar's sin about body types is that they offer a thin build, a 'wide' build (which really means "diminished wasp waist") and then like seven varieties of the default one with bigger breasts, thiner waist, bigger rears or bigger legs. It's like they couldn't understand why people wanted more body types in the first place, so they covered the 'basic' ones, except not really, and then tweaked the avereage body with a clear fixation on all the 'sexy' parts. The MMO with the best armor I ever saw was Warhammer Online, which might be an inherited merit of the miniatures (or perhaps not). Everything that wasn't an ork or chaos was awesome (in the 'this is something someone could actually wear' sense). Sadly, they went out of business because the game wasn't that good. The D-Souls series not only has the most sensible armor in the history of modern videogames, but also some of the most stupid looking ones. Not to mention some of the weapons that are twice the size of your character, or the tiny head syndrome certain armors had.

The cartoons that inspire Wildstar art style do not always treat their characters as soldiers, either, so I don't know where you are trying to go with that. Wildstar isn't trying to be realistic either. There's telekinetic mages, spells carved into ammunition, a rock based lifeform (or lifeforms, actually), and 'primal' energies which is just a fancy sci-fi-esque name for "elemental magic". And just like B&S, it's a game going for a non standard art-style, minus the 'photo-realism'. With that said, it would be nice if Wildstar customization wasn't so avereage, and adding different types of walking/running animations would be excellent. Wish all games had that just as they have hairstyles. But I think the only game that did that was Aion, as far as I can remember, and only after a long while. Animations take a lot more time than simple modelling and texturing.

You don't need the most expensive character creator to make a character you like: you just need to make something with the tools given and making concessions to the game. Like not being unable to create a redhead because the game lacks red hair color. So instead you go for brown. You work withing the given framework, just like in any roleplay. Not only roleplayers worry about characters. A lot of people do: it's one of the big lures MMOs have because there are not that many other games that offer multiplayer coupled with character customization. Those people want a certain feel of ownership over the characters they play, and they can't achieve that if everyone looks like a clone and if every class is locked into particular looks at the different level ranges (which is why ARR's glamour system stinks, but let's not dwell on that). You also end up seeing your character's face anyway in a lot of situations: like the character selection screen, the character window, previews of gear, cutscenes (if the game has them), screenshots. And then there's the little factoid that other people will be seeing your character's face. Constantly. Unless you wear a helmet. Besides the floating name over your head, your character's face is what people will remember if you don't have a particularly striking look (like a cool armor, but that's something that is constantly changing unless the game has a vanity system).

Maybe in older betas the starting clothes were painfully silly? I wouldn't be surprised if it was, because Carbine has had strange design choices before (like the torpedo chests). But I don't think I have seen any revealing clothes at all in Wildstar in the first 15 levels, except for some shorts here and there. The female running and walking animations are pretty bad in that sense. Granoks take the cake in that department, because their behinds sway so much. They get better if you use certain body types (particularly the ones that diminish the wasp-waist effect). They are as bad as Blade & Soul and Lineage 2 walking animations, though: more fit for supermodels than for soldiers.

From a roleplay perspective, the ammount of classes any given game has is effectively "as many as you want". Just as there are no scientist classes, there's no masonry, architects, businessmen or thieves in the mechanics of the game. But that doesn't mean that there is no actual in-universe people spending their lives doing those things. In fact, it's pretty unreal to think those don't exist, unless the lore states otherwise. Using that logic you can infer that there are likely masons, architects, businessmen and dagger wielding thieves in the world. The same way that not all people using swords and shields studied in the Gladiator's Guild, or that not all spear users come from Gridania, can be used to justify the existance of other 'classes'. It's just that the game doesn't represent them because it would be pretty inconvenient: the same reason cities aren't populated with tons of NPCs or why you can travel all across Eorzea by foot in a few in-game days instead. It's scaled down for convinience. The problems come with classes/jobs that can't be properly infered from the current setting. For example, currently ARR (as far as I know, anyway) doesn't have a good way to justify samurais or ninjas. But there are ways to justify thieves and musketeers: we have daggers, there's no conceptual barrier stopping characters from stealing things or being stealthy; and there's gunpowder and firearms. The only thing you can't do is say that there are actual guilds for those, but you can create a semi-canonical lore by simply creating the backstory. After all, and as I said before, there's no reason to think that all swordmen studied in the Gladiator's Guild. So there's no reason to think that thieves, musketeers or whatever had to come from an actual guild. All you need is the proper weapon and thematic skills.

The Non Disclosure Agreement was lifted a long time ago. You can talk about it all you want now. And on the internet!

My problems with Wildstar are mostly technical: the combat can be pretty unforgiving if you lag on the overworld; there are many enemies with instant, non-telegraphed stuns or knockdowns followed by hard hitting attacks; all mobs get auto-attacks, including the elites that end up doing a load of unavoidable damage with those things alone; and repair costs have the potential of making you broke if you run dungeons a lot, forcing you to get your gold in some other way (which I guess is a way to make sure people don't level up all the way to 50 with dungeons alone. Not sure how I feel about needing to stop doing something I enjoy to gather gold, though). Not to mention that they recently made the costume system a hassle to use. Oh, and there's also the character creation that is okay but greatly underdeveloped.

I haven't known any RP community that wasn't willing to handwave unique looking weapons as replicas of the original. After all, they are legendary weapons. Most of the time, anyway. Weaponcrafters copying their style for rich men or just for themselves (and the bragging rights) isn't far fetched. There's also a second approach: that special weapon you are holding is actually special, but it isn't the original or what the item name implies it to be. For example, you could have a paladin pretending his Curtana is actually an 'original' sword made of elemental ice crystals that he calls Bob. Just as long as you don't claim to be using the Curtana, you should be fine. Or a 'secret copy of the original with all its power intanct that a Wizard created somewhere'. That would be awful, too. I don't personally like using those OOCly high profile weapon models in-character, but I can't think of any good reason for why I don't.

That sounds awesome and incredibly tiresome. Then again, I think that's a sandboxy game, so things might not be as terrible as they'd be in a themepark. Maybe they'll be more terrible...

Yet your way of making travel difficult seems to be for you to take fourteen hours to reach your target, plus whatever time buying and gathering the correct supplies and crafting takes. And that's not considering that the player might die during the trip and have to redo one or more chunks of it, recrafting, gathering or buying supplies once again. A journey lasting fourteen hours to reach a goal is no different, conceptually, than fourteen hours of grinding to make gold, or upgrade your Relic weapon or some other goal. Or...that's if I'm reading things correctly after waking up. I bet I totally am. What is true is that difficulty shouldn't be necessarily linked with time (even though learning complex, 'hard' things takes longer), but with the effort/time ratio. That's why grinding mobs is not difficult: you are applying little effort, but the ammount of time units required to overcome it is large. I guess that's why many people, including developers, keep thinking that a hard thing is anything that takes a long time. Then we are stuck with simple mobs with eight times the HP they should have and sillyness like that. Though we should note that 'difficulty' is incredibly relative since, once you learn to overcome it, it becomes easier. Then all you have left is how much time it takes to complete the task.

They added one skirt and one dress that can be combined together made by weavers, I think? But they were pretty expensive last time I checked. Somewhere around 140k.

It is all contained locally: all the characters, no matter how many sliders you slap into them, will be made from a preset. They are all basically modification of it. Think of TERA: Bob's character makes a human and chooses preset 6 and hair 31, and then moved the sliders. Your computer receives the data from the server: Bob is entering at coordinates X,Y,Z, moving in W direction. He used Preset Face #3 and Hair #31. At the same time, your computer receives the data of the sliders. Then it renders Bob in all his slidy glory. There's no meaningful difference between someone's computer sending you the data of their face than them sending you their position which is constantly changing, unlike their face/body. And all faces, textures and models are already in your computer. All the game has to do is receive the slider data which, I repeat, is no more taxing that someone's position when bunnyhopping and randomly turning. It is still not an issue. And what Synaesthetic said.

So the problem isn't character customization per se but the focus on photorealistic graphics and engines. We can agree on that. We don't need any more shinny graphics. I still want to repat myself: No matter how many variables you put on a nose (or character's face), it's still not the same complexity as casting shadows and rendering reflections in real time (which often means rendering the whole objects two times), textures of any size, any model or any animation. The sliders only modify the polygons already in the face, so the game had to load them anyway to draw them. Placing a face-showing helmet is probably more resource intensive because then you are giving the computer a new set of polygons to draw and textures to place on top of the model.

I doubt in depth character sliders take any more computing time than shadows or reflections. While I don't know how a MMO does it and my knowledge of the required programming skills are pretty bad, I'd wager that they just slap a very lenghty code somewhere to the character. When they appear in the vecinity, the system reads that code and models their face until they leave. This would be no different nor more lenghty than drawing armor, boots, gauntlets, helmets or a weapon. It would also not take considerable space in the server. It's just one more variable for the character. Like quests. Don't worry about it because it's a non-issue. Shaders, reflections and textures is were all the resources will go.

The only character I have that has any kind of difference in her actions towards one sex or the other is K'airos, who just gets nervous in the pressence of unknown men in a very childish "That's a cute boy! Oh,he's looking at-me-he-must-know-I-think-he's-cute-Ihavetorunawayrunaway RUN AWAY!" way. She gets over it after a short time, though.

F2P games are more numerous because the game industry, like any industry, exists to make money and F2P titles are better to that end: they require little content updates and you only need a handful of players willing to waste hundreds of dollars in your cash shop to sustain them. Contrary to subscription games that need to build up loyalty to keep the steady flow of money coming. The problem with this statement is that some of us have taken chances with games from those regions and always found the same issues in each one of them. Do we have to give a change to every single game that the korean market spits out in case one of them is the golden goose? I don't think so. Their design philosophy permeates their industry and because of that we can safely conclude that games from that region are not going to appeal to us. This does not mean they can't change, it just means we have given them the opportunity and it didn't work. Maybe in some point of the future we'll have enough reasons to try again, but for now we have enough experience with them to say that they are not a thing we like. It's like going to various korean restaurants, try their menu, find them unappealing and concluding that korean cuisine is just not for you because they all have 'X' and 'Y' in common, and you just happen to not like 'X' and 'Y'. It's a reasonable inductive conclusion.

But sometimes Jow Schmoe really likes performing task X, a task that Mary Sue wouild hate to do and feels uncomfortable doing. If you take away the trinity, what you'll get is that Mary will have to perform task X, the task she hates and that Joe would prefer doing anyway. I don't know how a game without the trinity would perform. Taking it away pretty much means leaving only one role in. You can't take away dealing damage, as most MMOs are based around the murdering of mobs. That leaves you taking away tanking (no ways to reliably alter the mob's aggro lists) and healing (maybe by giving the players unreliable healing skills, with long cooldowns or that don't heal much or that heal only when outside of combat or whatever). Which means Joe Schmoe, who really likes tanking, can't tank, and Mary Sue, who really likes healing, can't heal. The trinity doesn't force people into roles. No game (that I know of, anyway) will force a player into being a tank class if he doesn't want to: he can always choose the rogue or the priest. It gives distinct combat roles so that people may specialize in them and pick the one they like the most. The only problem I see with it is that healers and tanks are always on higher demand, meaning getting parties is always on the "let's wait half an hour or more" side of things for damage dealers.

"A mechanicless zerg" is pretty much how I'd sum up Guild Wars 2, the game that doesn't like the Triumvirate. All boss encounters are a tide of characters shoving themselves to the big boss' feet, dying and being revived over and over again because there are no mechanics to it more than dealing damage (and getting knockbacked a whole lot). It used to be like that on instances, too, until they fixed that. Though now it's just a "Find the Glitch" or "Stack in a corner" contest instead.

Naturally, you can go with whatever interpretation you want. I present my reasons to not think they exist as a thought exercise and not as an imposition of truth. Minifilia's speech is indicative that languages exist, but it is not conclusive. Language is the only barrier she mentions that cannot be empirically proved during the course of the game, pretty much just like historical facts, like the age of Gridania. Except with historical facts you can take them as truth because there are no proofs against those either. And while I can't say there are proofs that languages don't exist (except for the fact they don't seem to affect anything at all), I certainly can say that there are no proofs that they do: There are barriers of race that can be seen all over Eorzea. Most of the races can be found in certain locations but not in others (Sea Wolves are more numerous in La Noscea, Elezen in Gridania, Highlanders in Ala Mhigo, Miqo'te are everywhere except Ishgard), and there are certain places that have racial problems. The barrier of nations can also be seen in the multiple city-states, with distinct interests that are often at odds with each other. There is also the barrier of creed, most notably between Ishgard and the other cities (and Gridania, if you see the Elementals as having some type of cult in the Padjal), and the fact that each city has a major patron deity that differs from the others. All of these are barriers we can empirically 'prove' that they existed by simply roaming the world, doing its questlines and reading the NPCs. But then we reach the barrier of language, that is nowhere to be seen. But not only cannot it be seen, which could be handwaved with the Echo, it is never mentioned or referenced outside this one speech that, as I said, is motivational. It doesn't look for accuracy but to boost morale. Minifilia isn't giving the soldiers a history class: she's boosting their morale by showing them how many barriers there are and how little they matter for they are all joined, and one of them -language- might as well not exist. With all that said, if I had to base any opinion on the "Authors' Intent" (something that I don't subscribe to, but there you go), and supposing the speech isn't the result of lazydom, then it's pretty clear that different languages exist in the world. They just failed at showing the players that they do. They failed at the "Show, don't tell" goal, for whatever reason, which makes things confusing. Specifically, confusing their lack of ability to show with the subject not existing at all. So I guess we should go ask in the official lore forums and maybe one of the loremasters will tell us what's what.

If you have your heart on it (and the personality), you could smash your character against a random person. You can also sit and think where you want your character to go, then either try to move things in that way ICly (or discussing OOCly with friends, if needed), or even find a Linkshell or other roleplayers in the forums that might be interested in some interactions with your character. Alts are another choice, though in my personal experience with ARR you will get tired of the quests, FATEs and storylines by your second or third character. By my experience on roleplay in MMOs, you won't really have time or enough meaningful contacts to roleplay more than two or three of them as 'main' characters, though.

I stopped playing Vindictus because my country, Moleland, is IP blocked by Nexon. I managed to play for a few months using proxies and pretty much soloed all my way to level 61. It was a very fun game. But they recycled enviorements almost as bad as Bioware in Dragon Age 2. So when they upgraded their IP blocks, I couldn't bother to find a workaround. Incidentally, I can't play GW2 after having played Wildstar's beta. I logged in GW2 to play a bit and I got immediately smashed by a bunch of mobs and a trebuchet that had nothing better to do than lob rocks at a single man. And then I was knocked down two or three times in a row. So I logged out and played Terraria. Yay!